About Portal Project Artists.

Portal Project artists are Alaister, Daiga, Johnny B, John J Sheehy, Lewis EM, L(el), Lui Saatchi, Mary Vallely, Matt R, Peter C Norman, Peter H, Ricaso, Richard Fletcher

Portal Project artists

Alaister is an artist from Belfast whose work explores the spiritual and metaphysical dimensions of life on Earth. For him, art is a way of having a voice in the world, a language through which the invisible becomes visible.

Having lived on the streets for many years and survived addiction to cocaine and heroin, Alistair’s practice is deeply rooted in healing and transformation. His work bridges ancient and contemporary technologies - from crystals and lasers to cymatic frequencies - which he understands as tools for revealing unseen layers of reality. Drawing on self-taught studies in quantum mechanics, martial arts, and spiritual science, he experiments with sound, vibration, and energy to explore the connection between body, matter, and consciousness.

A long-term practitioner of yoga and martial arts, Alaister approaches both art and life as alchemical processes of renewal. His self-built cymatic Chladni plate, made from a snare drum, allows him to experiment with the frequencies that he believes can restore harmony within the self and the world. He describes his work as a map of unseen realms, of energy movements and universal language that speak to our shared capacity to heal.

Alaister

Daiga

Daiga’s work unfolds through intricate drawings and paintings that merge gesture, text, and landscape into a dense visual language. Inspired equally by the natural world and the layered architecture of the city, her compositions often hover between abstraction and narrative. Using acrylics, markers, and mixed media on paper and canvas, she creates rhythmic surfaces where letters, trees and built forms dissolve into one another.

Each work feels like a terrain - part forest, part layered memory - where colour functions both as structure and emotion. Words and symbols appear from pigment, suggesting the simultaneity of thought, sound and movement. Her use of vivid colour and sculptural mark-making builds tension between the intuitive and the deliberate.

Her works hold both a language and a landscape: a place where emotion, environment, and meaning continually overlap and reconfigure themselves.

Johnny B

Johnny B creates luminous visual fields that resemble abstracted landscapes, seascapes or maps. Built up over time, the works’ compositions play with the tension between geometry and intuition, weaving together shape, rhythm, and colour into a kind of visual music.

Working primarily on paper and canvas with acrylics and markers, Johnny constructs intricate worlds that exist in a space between the cartographic and the emotional. Each painting feels like a translation of movement or memory, a topography of feeling rendered through mathematical harmony and improvisation.

He speaks of his process as an act of alignment, balancing “grace, beauty and structure” within the painted surface. The result is work that oscillates between inner and outer worlds: meditations on being, time, and belonging that unfold through radiant chromatic space.

John J Sheehy

John J Sheehy is a painter, poet, and writer whose work carries the force of instinct and faith. Born in Ireland in 1949, he immigrated to London in the 1950s and began painting later in life, after periods of homelessness and hardship. His creative practice spans painting, sculpture, photography and poetry, each forming part of an expansive visual language that speaks to healing and resilience.

John’s paintings, often made quickly and prolifically, recall memories of Ireland, folklore, and the shifting intensity of daily life. His imagery - horseriders, ships, musicians and city streets - repeats across his work like symbols in a dream. Through repetition, these figures become otherworldly, embodying cycles of continuity and transformation.

John describes art as “a friend to me - a big time friend. It helps me overcome burdens and worries; it supports me through depression and difficult moments.” For him, painting is not only an expression, but also a revelation. He states,“I paint instinctively… as if the inspiration flows through my hand directly from God.”

Lewis EM

Lewis EM is an artist working across assemblage, drawing, collage and textiles, exploring the spaces between imagination and experience. Living in different places in the past, he reflects on the transient nature of home, translating these feelings into intricate styles for ideas of curtains, carpets, textiles and prints that bridge the gap between current circumstances and future possibilities.

His practice draws on theatre, myth and ritual, combining elements of the different genres and Greco-Roman amphitheatres to create works that feel both intimate and expansive. Lewis begins with pastel, oil and ink sketches, transforming them through digital processes into patterns that exist across physical and virtual realms. These works are studies on colour and movement, creating visual landscapes where desire and imagination converge.

Lewis’s art is grounded in curiosity and meticulous presentation, finding resonance in both the fantastical and the everyday. He seeks to craft patterns and narratives that invite viewers into alternate spaces, encouraging reflection on what it means to inhabit a futuristic world and imagine continuity beyond it. His work is a quiet exploration of energy, presence and transformation - a dialogue between the seen and the unseen, between what is and what could be.

L(el)

L(el)’s paintings emerge from gesture and intuition. Working with mixed media, she begins by laying down clusters of colour—“blobby spots,” as she calls them—which slowly resolve into the shapes of animals, plants or flowers. Once a composition finds balance, she folds the paper or canvas in half, creating vibrant, asymmetrical mirror-images that vibrate with motion and energy.

Her work reflects a fascination with symmetry and transformation, with how a form can hold multiple meanings at once. Each image feels like a discovery: spontaneous, playful, and yet deeply considered.

L(el)’s practice is grounded in sensitivity to the essence of “things”, an ability to see life and movement within form. In her paintings, the abstract and the figurative coexist, revealing the aliveness hidden within everyday shapes and gestures.

Lui Saatchi

Lui Saatchi is a multimedia artist whose work transforms found materials—wood, cardboard, metal and discarded canvases—into vibrant, layered compositions. His paintings oscillate between abstraction and figuration, ranging from detailed portraits to expressive explosions of colour.

Lui’s path to art began on the streets of London. Formerly a craftsman working in wood, metal, and signage, he turned to painting as a way to process hardship and rediscover meaning. Self-taught and relentlessly experimental, he sees art as both survival and discovery. He states,
“Art helps me channel something positive. It’s my portal to another world—the abstract world of painting”.

Driven by curiosity and resilience, Lui gathers whatever materials are at hand—roof tiles, blinds, sand, rice—and uses them in his works in ways that repurposes them but also gives another meaning to the artworks itself. His practice, rooted in improvisation and resourcefulness, reflects a profound belief in art’s capacity to transmute struggle into beauty and to make sense of the world anew.

Mary Vallely

Mary Vallely (b. 1964, Dublin) is a painter whose work merges the spiritual, mythological and deeply personal. Having experienced homelessness and hardship from a young age, Mary’s art functions as both healing practice and storytelling.

Her paintings are rich in colour and symbolism, often depicting oceans, mythical creatures, and beings from other worlds. Water is a recurring element - both a metaphor for transformation and a threshold between realms. “The ocean is a magical world, full of beings unknown to humans - a peaceful world full of wonder”, she comments.

Mary’s creative process channels memory and emotion through archetypal imagery. Each work becomes a reflection on resilience, compassion and the mystery of being. In their fluidity and depth, her paintings invite viewers to enter a space of empathy and imagination - a world where pain and beauty coexist and where creation itself becomes a form of grace.

Matt R

Matt R is a photographer and digital artist whose work bridges the real and the imagined, exploring alternative worlds through light, movement, and vibrant color. Drawing inspiration from science fiction, 1990s pop culture and the streets of London, he transforms everyday encounters into layered visual narratives that feel both familiar and otherworldly.

His practice involves experimental photographic techniques and absurdist digital collage to create surreal, sometimes illogical, compositions that evoke distant planets, alien landscapes and memories of pop culture rendered into surreal dimensions. Matt R’s works act as portals, where colors and forms resonate like alchemical elements, suggesting energies and forces beyond our ordinary perception. Through the interplay of texture, hue, and motion, he invites viewers to inhabit spaces that are simultaneously fantastical, cosmic and nostalgic. 

In Matt R’s vision, familiar streets, fragments of urban life, pop culture celebrities ans night skies,  become ingredients in a broader exploration of the unknown. He layers imagery and manipulates light to reveal hidden rhythms and structures, crafting visual experiences that are immersive, playful, and deeply imaginative. His work is an invitation to wonder, to question the boundaries between reality and fiction, and to encounter the infinite possibilities of existence through the lens of art.

Peter C. Norman

Peter C. Norman works with pastels and crayons, often layering his drawings on tracing paper to gather figures from children’s books, magazines and other printed materials. By reimagining these characters in new contexts, he takes them out of their original stories and allows them to embark on entirely different journeys, evolving into worlds and narratives of his own creation.

In Peter’s work, familiar figures encounter fantastical animals, otherworldly spaceships and strange landscapes that exist beyond the boundaries of the original books. His practice is playful, imaginative and open-ended, inviting viewers to enter a space where the ordinary becomes extraordinary. There is a gentle naivety in his approach, a sense of wonder and openness that allows the viewer to consider new possibilities for storytelling, identity, and being.

By juxtaposing characters and motifs from different sources, Peter creates a visual dialogue between past and present, memory and invention, the real and the fantastical. His works suggest that stories are never fixed; they are fluid, alive and capable of transformation. In doing so, he opens a space for curiosity, delight, and reflection, revealing the imaginative and regenerative potential of storytelling.

Peter H

Peter H’s work transforms the streets of London into a vivid cartoon universe. His paintings and sculptural collages capture fleeting moments of daily life - TFL staff in uniform, dancers at Notting Hill Carnival, passers-by dressed in Gucci—rendered with humour, empathy and a touch of the surreal.

Using recycled materials such as cardboard, packaging and Styrofoam, Peter H constructs layered tableaux that are both playful and profound. He often paints on both sides of a surface, revealing dual narratives and perspectives - a back and a front to every story.

Peter H’s work captures what it means to be an observer in the city: fascinated, curious, sometimes alienated, but always alive to the strangeness and beauty of the everyday. His scenes, like film stills or comic panels, turn urban encounters into modern myths - snapshots of belonging, humour and human complexity.

Ricaso

Ricaso is a painter and naturopath whose practice bridges art and alchemy. Her work explores the energetic relationships between colour, form and vibration, proposing painting as a process of transformation and healing.

Beginning her practice during a period of homelessness, she used painting as a way to restore balance and meaning. Sacred geometry and elemental correspondences are central to her process. Works such as Venus and Sun and Moon translate planetary energies into visual codes, linking gold, silver, and copper to the celestial bodies they represent. Through these alchemical correspondences, Ricaso channels balance, energy and transformation, creating paintings that act as catalysts for reflection and attunement.

Her process is meticulous, intuitive and meditative. She layers pigments and powders, allowing colour and form to interact in ways that are both precise and fluid, producing images that seem to pulse with life. The results are dense, vibrant compositions that invite viewers to feel rather than simply see, engaging both the senses and the imagination.

Ricaso’s work is a dialogue between inner experience and outer world, between the tangible and the metaphysical. It is concerned with the relational energies that flow through human and natural systems, seeking to reveal the hidden connections that underpin existence. In her paintings, alchemy is not metaphor but practice: colour becomes element, form becomes energy, and the act of creation itself becomes a means of healing, insight, and wonder.

Richard Fletcher

Richard Fletcher is an artist working primarily in pen and ink, creating intricately patterned drawings that explore the intersections of nature and urban life. His work captures fleeting moments, overlooked details, and the hidden rhythms of the environment, revealing the subtle connections between the human and the non-human world.

In his illusory drawing Gremlins, faces and figures emerge playfully from tangled undergrowth, drawing the viewer into a liminal space where the cycles of soil, leaves, and natural forms intertwine with memory and imagination. Richard’s work encourages reflection on our relationship with the earth, inviting a deeper awareness of the energy and spirit present in everyday surroundings.

In Nude by a Waterheater, he produces almost photorealistic imagery that evokes recollection and temporality, capturing the strangeness of existence - the simultaneity of the past, present, and timeless. Through intricate lines and delicate shading, Richard explores the uncanny interplay between observation and memory, creating drawings that are both meditative and alive with hidden life.

Learn more